phawrongulafandomcom-20200214-history
"Help Ariel" Episode
On April 7th, 2012, PZ made a blog post requesting financial donations for a young girl with cancer: "She just wants to go to the Harry Potter Experience in Florida. It seems a very small thing to ask." Note: I think he's changed the text of this post since the original. I made a comment to the post expressing my opinion that perhaps we should focus more on curing sick children than sending other children that cannot be cured on vacation (or sending them video games, as I mentioned the Child's Play charity). Within minutes, an emotional shitstorm had errupted and I was met with extreme vitriol, mostly coming from Martin Wagner and accused of all sorts of things, including telling people what they could and could not do with their money and personally attacking the sick girl the post was about. Then I was dungeonized and the entire comment thread was deleted (I think the blog text was changed as well). On August 6, 2012, PZ announced a change in rules and specified that the dungeon was for the most extreme and dangerous people that had no business being around the decent people of the site. He opened an unmoderated thread for the sole purpose of airing grievances and pointed out that the thread would be deleted in 24 hours. Feeling that I had a valid grievance, I felt it was in the interest of fairness that I should be allowed to post to this thread, but apparently the "airing of grievances" didn't apply to those in the dungeon. So I knowingly and acknowledgingly violated the rules about creating a new account to get around a ban for the sole purpose of airing my grievance in this temporary thread, feeling that the rules in this case did not serve justice. To the credit of PZ, at no point did he chastise me for this (although the new account has been banned, its comments remain, which is mostly fine, though I wish he'd waited until he was going to nuke the grievance thread before banning it and give me my chance to respond to his comment). The following images are screencaps of my comments under the new account, demonstrating that I've been nothing but polite in this situation, as well as the text of the response I was going to make to the above PZ comment had my new account not been blocked (which I did email to him, though I doubt he'll read it). My Resonse to PZ's Comment I don't recall anyone saying (and as far as I know, I was the only one posing the question) that if you had $1 million and 10 children who were terminal and could get treatment that would cure them for $100,000 and 5,000 terminal children with no hope of a cure, which is more ethical: buying 5,000 PS3s for the terminal children or buying treatment for the 10? (which was a point/clarification I was typing when I was banned). Also, as far as I recall, I posted within an hour of the post going up, and it was nuked within 45 minutes of that, so I don't know about you going to sleep or any hordes, unless that was people coming out after I was already banned. I'm personally not a horde (I think I made 5 posts on that thread total), nor do I lead a horde, nor did I come here as part of a horde. I've been reading and commenting to Pharyngula for years, and from my perspective, the situation was merely that Martin Wagner got his panties in a bunch that I would dare question whether or not the fundraising force of Pharyngula should be focused on providing entertainment for sick children versus curing sick children. I stated my opinion on the matter, and if someone disagrees with that, that's their option, but they shouldn't be calling it an attack or acting like it's an attack or them or the child in question when I challenge them to consider it. At no point did I say what someone can or can't do or even imply that I could (which was what I was continually accused of doing). At no point did I say she shouldn't be helped because she was a middle-class western white girl. I may have said that I didn't think she would be getting the type of support she was getting if she wasn't a western middle-class white girl (and I hope that's not something that you feel is easily disputable), but I never said that she shouldn't get "help" because of it (assuming you classify sending her on a vacation as "help"). Unless I made a severe typo, I have no idea how anyone came out with the idea that a) I was saying she shouldn't get medical treatment because she was white (considering I'm white myself) or b) I was saying what they should or should not do with their money or even c) that she shouldn't be allowed to go on vacation because she was sick or have a fundraiser to raise money to go on vacation. My question was merely one of where we, as a society, place our priorities.